Legal History Commons^™

Green V. Garrett: How The Economic Boom Of Professional Sports Helped To Create, And Destroy, Baltimore’S Memorial Stadium, Jordan Vardon

Legal History Publications

Buildings, like people, have lives all their own. They have beginnings, middles, ends, and even good and bad years. This project is a study of a building known by many names, including Venable Park, Mud Stadium, The Great White Elephant of 33rd St., The Old Gray Lady, and the World’s Largest Outdoor Insane Asylum, although for most of its life it was officially referred to as Memorial Stadium, located in Baltimore, Maryland.

The story of Memorial Stadium is really the story of those in the community that surround it. As the use and popularity of the Stadium grew, so too …

Marbury V. Madison And The Foundation Of Law, Jeffrey C. Tuomala

Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

The Kennedy Justice Department's Enforcement Of Civil Rights: A View From The Trenches, Brian K. Landsberg

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Books

The Kennedy Justice Department's Enforcement of Civil Rights: A View from the Trenches, in The Kennedy Justice Department’s Enforcement of Civil Rights: A View from the Trenches, in John F. Kennedy History, Memory, Legacy: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry (John Delane Williams et al. eds., 2010) available at www.und.edu/instruct/jfkconference/.

Civil Rights Chronology, January 1961 -- November 1963, in The Kennedy Justice Department’s Enforcement of Civil Rights: A View from the Trenches, in John F. Kennedy History, Memory, Legacy: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry (John Delane Williams et al. eds., 2010) available at www.und.edu/instruct/jfkconference/.

Wittgenstein Tests Mr. Justice Holmes: On Holmes's Proposal To Separate Legal Concepts From Moral Concepts, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Researching Georgia Legislative History, Carol Watson

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Attorneys often seek Georgia legislative history when trying to clarify a vague statute, determine the intent of the legislature or trace a law’s amendments over time. Although sometimes difficult to compile, Georgia legislative history tidbits can be gathered by consulting a variety of resources.

Crowdsourcing And Open Access: Collaborative Techniques For Disseminating Legal Materials And Scholarship, Timothy K. Armstrong

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This short essay surveys the state of open access to primary legal source materials (statutes, judicial opinions and the like) and legal scholarship. The ongoing digitization phenomenon (illustrated, although by no means typified, by massive scanning endeavors such as the Google Books project and the Library of Congress's efforts to digitize United States historical documents) has made a wealth of information, including legal information, freely available online, and a number of open-access collections of legal source materials have been created. Many of these collections, however, suffer from similar flaws: they devote too much effort to collecting case law rather than …

All Judges Are Political—Except When They Are Not: Acceptable Hypocrisies And The Rule Of Law, Keith J. Bybee

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This paper contains the introduction to the new book, All Judges Are Political—Except When They Are Not: Acceptable Hypocrisies and the Rule of Law (Stanford University Press, 2010).

The book begins with the observation that Americans are divided in their beliefs about whether courts operate on the basis of unbiased legal principle or of political interest. This division in public opinion in turn breeds suspicion that judges do not actually mean what they say, that judicial professions of impartiality are just fig leaves used to hide the pursuit of partisan purposes.

Comparing law to the practice of common courtesy, the …

Reminiscence On The 1984 Swan Falls Water Rights Negotiations, Patrick D. Costello

Articles

No abstract provided.

Recognizing The Individual: The Muhtasibs Of Early Mamluk Cairo And Fustat, Kristen Stilt

Faculty Working Papers

This Article studies the biographies of several key muhtasibs in Mamluk Cairo and Fustat to understand the types of individuals who held the position and how the individual background, education, status among the populace, relationship to the ruling elite, and the means of obtaining the position of each contributed to how the particular muhtasib functioned in office.

Price Setting And Hoarding In Mamluk Egypt, Kristen Stilt

Faculty Working Papers

This Article studies the legal position of the muhtasib in medieval Cairo, using the biographical information available about the individuals who held the position to understand the actions they took in office. The muhtasib, who was an inspector of public places and markets in particular, was a key legal actor in terms of applying law immediately to a situation he encountered; he was a common face of the law in society. This Article, influenced in method by legal realism, shows that in addition to the law that a particular muhtasib intended to apply to a particular case, biographical information is …

Aspects Of Deconstruction: The "Easy Case" Of The Under-Aged President, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

When the deconstructionist says that all cases are to some degree problematic, the mainstream legal scholar gleefully pulls out a favorite crystal-clear case and asserts "not this one!" Judging from the law review commentary, the most popular of these "easy cases" concerns the constitutional mandate that the President shall be at least thirty-five years of age. Deconstructionists say that all interpretation depends on context. Radical deconstructionists add that, because contexts can change, there can be no such thing as a single interpretation of any text that is absolute and unchanging for all time.

easy case, deconstruction in law, US Constitution …

Aspects Of Deconstruction: Refuting Indeterminacy With One Bold Thought, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

Deconstruction has already happened on the Supreme Court. Not only can no member of the Court really believe that "the law" (self-invented by the very Court it is supposed to govern!) can constrain the result in any individual case, but its members have also convinced themselves that they have no time to be concerned with dispensing justice to the parties. The justificatory legal language used in judicial opinions is not what our law teachers told us it was. The justificatory legal language is not provided to explain—much less constrain—the result in the case. Rather, it is a mode of couching …

Is International Law Part Of Natural Law?, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

The affinity of international law to natural law goes back a long way to the classic writers of international law. "Natural law" is the method of dispute resolution based on a conscious attempt to perpetuate past similarities in dispute resolution. "International law" has a deep affinity to this natural law method, for it consists of those practices that have "worked" in inter-nation conflict resolution.

Can Any Legal Theory Constrain Any Judicial Decision?, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

A growing number of legal scholars have recently revived the American legal realist thesis that legal theory does not dictate the result in any particular case because legal theory itself is indeterminate. A more radical group has added that theory can never constrain judicial practice. I will present a spectrum of types of legal theories to demonstrate that the position of the more radical group of writers is correct—that legal theory is inherently incapable of identifying which party should win any given case.

Can Legislatures Constrain Judicial Interpretation Of Statutes?, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

An aspect of the battle over deconstruction is whether resort to legislative intent might help to determine the content of a statutory text that otherwise, in splendid isolation, could be deconstructed by simply positing different interpretive contexts. I examine the same issue by recounting my own quest for determinate meaning in statutes—a sort of personal legislative history. I do not claim for jurisprudence the role of ensuring faithful reception of the legislature's message, for that is impossible. At best, jurisprudential theory only reduces the degrees of interpretive freedom, and then only probably, not necessarily. The more significant thesis of this …

Pragmatic Indeterminacy, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

If, as a result of taking Indeterminacy seriously, we revolutionize the way we teach law and the way we select judges, then we will also revolutionize the way cases are litigated (because the new judges will expect to hear a different kind of argumentation) and the way people order their lives in anticipation of the way their disputes will be decided by these new judges.

There Is No Norm Of Intervention Or Non-Intervention In International Law, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

Comments on Prof. Jianming Shen's position that humanitarian intervention is unlawful under international law and that there is a principle of non-intervention in international law that is so powerful that it amounts to a jus cogens prohibition.

Legal Realism Explains Nothing, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

I argue that American legal realism as derived from Oliver Wendell Holmes's prediction theory of law was misinterpreted, and that a deeper examination of law-as-prediction might help to reduce the pathology of judicial lawmaking that has been the unfortunate consequence of legal realism.

The Speluncean Explorers--Further Proceedings, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

Lon L. Fuller's The Case of the Speluncean Explorers is a classic in jurisprudence. The case presents five judicial opinions which clash with each other and produce for the reader an exhilarating excursion into fundamental theories of law and the state and the role of courts vis-i-vis legislatures and executives. Though the issues articulated by Fuller are timeless, the past thirty years in jurisprudential scholarship have produced at least one major new vantage point—the "rights thesis".

Public Wrongs And Private Bills: Indemnification And Government Accountability In The Early Republic, James E. Pfander, Jonathan L. Hunt

Faculty Working Papers

Students of the history of administrative law in the United States regard the antebellum era as one in which strict common law rules of official liability prevailed. Yet conventional accounts of the antebellum period often omit a key institutional feature. Under the system of private legislation in place at the time, federal government officers were free to petition Congress for the passage of a private bill appropriating money to reimburse the officer for personal liability imposed on the basis of actions taken in the line of duty. Captain Little, the officer involved in one oft-cited case, Little v. Barreme, pursued …